The City, the Sparrow, and the Tempestuous Sea | Hakai Magazine
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This article is part of Birdopolis, a three-part series that explores the lives of birds that are, by accident or design, spending more time in urban environments. The other stories are “The Gull Next Door” and “Honolulu: A Seabird’s Surprising Five Star Destination”.
For insights into the urban lives of another group of coastal birds—gulls—watch the recording of our webinar “Birdopolis: Coastal Birds at Home in the City.”
Today, the name of the park preserve—Idlewild—seems aspirational. Snugged up against the northwest border of John F. Kennedy International Airport in the New York borough of Queens, population 2.2 million, the green space, approximately one-fifth the size of nearby Central Park, is a remaining sliver of the expansive wetlands that once carpeted the Atlantic coastline. It’s also some of the only habitat remaining for one of North America’s endangered birds, the saltmarsh sparrow. And in their little patch of wild, female saltmarsh sparrows are hardly idle. Undeterred as jets fly overhead every five minutes or so, females flit and dip through the grasses, hurriedly building nests so that they can lay their eggs and raise them to fully fledged chicks, all within one lunar cycle.
I’ve joined Alex Cook, a biologist at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF), and her team of four in Idlewild this July 2019 morning, already steamy at 5 a.m., to learn more about their work and the saltmarsh sparrow. As we load up the gear, I notice the stark contrast between our knee-high rubber boots—mine, shiny black and newly purchased; theirs, mud-caked and sun-bleached—and rightly predict what the day has in store. Within 100 meters of entering the wetlands, I’m breathing loudly and heavily, trying to keep up with the all-female team skirting along a barely discernible path through the sloppy mud.
